Archives de catégorie : Literary

MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS de Joshua Henkin

In the vein of Matthew Thomas’s We Are Not Ourselves, Mona Simpson’s My Hollywood, and Magda Szabo’s The Door, Morningside Heights is an epic novel about love and loyalty, privilege and faith

MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS
by Joshua Henkin
Pantheon, March 2020

Morningside Heights tells the story of Pru Steiner, an Orthodox Jew raised in Ohio, who, in 1975, falls in love with Spence Robin, MacArthur winner and the youngest art historian ever to receive tenure at Columbia. Her career derailed by an early marriage to a powerful and acclaimed man, Pru settles into an ambivalent domesticity, raising their daughter Sarah. Spence, meanwhile, has been keeping a secret: an earlier marriage, which produced a son, Arlo, with whom he’s no longer in touch. Thirty years later, something is wrong with Spence. The great art historian can’t focus. Still in his fifties, he becomes taciturn and forgetful. With their daughter in medical school in California, Pru must face his illness on her own. Arlo, now a wealthy venture capitalist with access to a promising experimental drug, has gotten back in touch. Pru, meanwhile, is struggling for money. She can’t afford Ginny, the domestic aide who takes care of Spence. And she has met a man at a caregiver’s class and the threat of romance looms. Spanning time zones and decades, Morningside Heights tells the story of a marriage enduring through adversity, and how ties of blood, long frayed, persist in the face of misfortune.

Joshua Henkin is the author of the novels Swimming Across the Hudson, a Los Angeles Times Notable Book; Matrimony, a New York Times Notable Book; and The World Without You, which was named an Editors’ Choice Book by The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune and was the winner of the 2012 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American Fiction and a finalist for the 2012 National Jewish Book Award. He directs and teaches in the MFA program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College.

DOXOLOGY de Nell Zink

Two generations of an American family come of age—one before 9/11, one after—in this wildly original novel from the “intellectually restless, uniquely funny” (New York Times Book Review) mind of Nell Zink

DOXOLOGY
by Nell Zink
Ecco, Spring/Summer 2019

Pam, Daniel, and Joe might be the worst punk band on the Lower East Side. Struggling to scrape together enough cash and musical talent to make it, they are waylaid by surprising arrivals—a daughter for Pam and Daniel, a solo hit single for Joe. As the ‘90s wane, the three friends share in one another’s successes, working together to elevate Joe’s superstardom and raise baby Flora. On September 11, 2001, the city’s unfathomable devastation coincides with a shattering personal loss for the trio. In the aftermath, Flora comes of age, navigating a charged political landscape and discovering a love of the natural world. Joining the ranks of those fighting for ecological conservation, Flora works to bridge the wide gap between powerful strategists and ordinary Americans, becoming entangled ever more intimately with her fellow activists along the way. And when the country faces an astonishing new threat, Flora’s family will have no choice but to look to the past—both to examine wounds that have never healed, and to rediscover strengths they have long forgotten. At once a biting takedown of today’s political climate and a touching invocation for humanity’s goodness, Doxology offers daring revelations about America’s past and possible future that could only come from Nell Zink, one of the sharpest novelists of our time.

Nell Zink is the critically acclaimed author of “Nicotine”, “Private Novelist”, “Mislaid”, and “he Wallcreeper”. Her writing has appeared in n+1 and Harper’s. She lives in Germany.

LUCIA IN LA-LA-LAND de Tien-Yi Lee, un roman prometteur

Pour son agent américain il s’agit de l’un des meilleurs livres qu’elle n’ait jamais représenté. Pamela Dorman vient d’en acheter les droits nord-américains pour Penguin, et scouts et éditeurs étrangers s’y intéressent déjà :

A brilliant, heart-warming, language- and plot-driven examination of madness, identity, unexpected family ties, and the perpetual friction between love and duty

LUCIA IN LA-LA-LAND
by Tien-Yi Lee
Penguin US, TBA

The novel, told through three different POV’s starts as we see the irrepressible Lucia Bok recently married to her older husband, Yonah, a tough, charismatic Israeli with a glass eye. Together, they live on the Lower East Side. They run an organic grocery store. They think they will live happily ever after but Lucia’s older sister Miranda is wary. When Lucia starts to act a little “off” and ends up in a mental hospital Lucia and Yonah think she just needs some rest. Miranda knows better. Lucia is in fact bipolar and has had an episode before. Lucia needs to be stabilized and put on the right meds, and her husband is enabling her by letting her just come home. But there is nothing Miranda can do. You can’t force a patient to stay in a hospital and even if they stay, you can’t force them to take medication. And so, Lucia returns home, but not for long. When her affliction ramps up again, Lucia decides she wants a baby and since Yonah does not, Lucia disappears.
Enter Manny, an undocumented Ecuadorian immigrant, who starts to date Lucia. Once she gets pregnant, he is swept into her whirlwind and is blindsided when her illness takes a psychotic turn after the birth of the child. Co-dependent Miranda, having moved far away to Switzerland in an attempt to live her own life, flies back to get Lucia straightened out—if only it were that easy. Attempting a fresh start, Lucia decides she, Manny, and the baby should move to rural Ecuador. But as they plow ahead there, Lucia’s actions spawn unintended consequences for those she loves, and she, like the others in her family, struggle to find balance between self-fulfillment and moral obligation. At its heart, Lucia In La-La Land is the story of a young woman’s quest to have a family, a life, and not be defined by her illness.

Tien-Yi Lee’s work has been published in TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and American Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In 2012, she was awarded an Artist’s Fellowship by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

THE OLD DRIFT, premier roman de Namwali Serpell, sera publié par Crown sous son imprint Hogarth

Namwali Serpell est née en 1980 en Zambie. Elle vient de recevoir pour « The Sack » le Prix littéraire Caine, décerné à la meilleure nouvelle en langue anglaise écrite par un écrivain d’origine africaine. « The Sack » est un extrait de THE OLD DRIFT, dont le manuscrit complet devrait être disponible sous 18 mois. Le talent de Namwali Serpell n’a manqué d’être immédiatement remarqué par le Guardian et la BBC.

The Great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for, written by one of the most exciting new African writers

THE OLD DRIFT
by Namwali Serpell
Hogarth, Late 2017/Early 2018

THE OLD DRIFT is a vast and ambitious, episodic narrative about a curse that affects three generations, that takes us from Livingstone’s ‘discovery’ of Victoria Falls in 1855, through the foundation of Northern Rhodesia, its transformation into Zambia, the Zambian Space Program of the 1960s (with astronauts called Afronauts), to the southern Africa of 2050.   It is broken into three parts, narrating The Grandmothers, The Mothers and the Children of one family, playing with and subverting classic fiction tropes, including magical realism, and even science fiction.

Namwali arrives with a tremendous amount of acclaim:  her first published story was selected for the Best American Short Stories; she was just awarded the Caine Prize; she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award; and was chosen to be one of the Africa39, representing the 39 best African born writers under 40 working in the world.  She was awarded a Bread Loaf Tuition Scholarship this year. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, n+1, McSweeney’s, Bidoun, Callaloo, The L.A. Review of Books, The SF Chronicle, and The Guardian.

THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN de Parnaz Foroutan

If your child is your legacy, who are you without one? What story will you leave behind?
A wrenching and heartfelt debut novel

THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN
by Parnaz Foroutan
Ecco, Fall 2015

Set in the Iranian town of Kermanshah at the turn of the twentieth century, THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN is the intimate, poetic, and brutal story of a young woman beholden to the schemes and strictures of a male world. In a cloistered household of wealthy Jewish merchants, at a time when a woman’s worth is measured only by the number of male heirs she can produce, Rakhel, a barren young bride, must do the impossible: produce a son and satisfy her husband Asher’s wild desire for preeminence. Their struggle slowly rends their family asunder, dividing Asher from his family and breaking the delicate bonds between the women of the house, which have grown like flowers in a garden as they battle impossible odds to save Rakhel and her place in the household.

THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN’s lyrical prose and heartbreaking evocation of female struggle in a forgotten time and place is reminiscent of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, but it is not just a novel about women. It is a story of Iran, of a lost cultural moment and identity that flourished before the wars and the reign of the shahs. And it is a story about family—about the things that draw us closer and perhaps inevitably push us apart.

Parnaz Foroutan was born in Iran and spent her early childhood there. This novel, for which she received PEN USA’s Emerging Voices fellowship, was inspired by her family history. She has been named to the Hedgebrook Fellowship and residency, and has received funding from the Elizabeth George Foundation, among other institutions. Writers like Holly Morris, Gloria Steinem, and Carolyn Forche have reviewed her work with praise and hold the project in high esteem.